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Menirva is hanging onto her dreams. She’s 18. She’s lived as a refugee and a sweatshop seamstress since she was 14. Dreams are all she has.

“I don’t want to drop my dream. I always want to keep our hope alive, that someone will help us, will accept us. I cannot imagine that I will accept life here,” she said, and the tears begin. “I am tired. I cannot take it any more. I want to continue to dream.”

The death threat was no surprise to Ihab Ephraim Khodr. He had seen it happen to other Christians. There had been plenty of other vague and general threats, year after year, before he received a personal threat just before Iraq’s March 7 elections. He had been waiting for it.

His expectation is inked into his right wrist.

In his student days in the first half of the decade, Ihab had begun to get a tattoo that would have portrayed a crown of thorns wrapped around his wrist. It was to be a sign of his devotion to Christ. It also would have made him recognizable on the street as a Christian.

An election victory for Iraq’s more secular, less sectarian parties backing Prime Minister-elect Ayad Allawi isn’t tempting Iraqi Christian refugees to return home, even as members of the Chaldean Church hierarchy continue to express confidence that Christians can live in peace in Iraq.

“It’s very, very difficult to turn back to Iraq, impossible to turn back,” Toma Georgees told The Catholic Register in his apartment in the Geremana neighbourhood of Damascus, Syria. “Our problem is not with the Iraqi government. Our problem is with Iraqi people, ignorant people who want to kill us, who want to kill all the Christians... Those people are ignorant, and they just want to drink our blood as Christians.”

You don’t need to know a word of old Syriac or Aramaean, not a word of Arabic. You don’t need to know the stories of kidnappings, death threats or the desperate flight to the border. You don’t need to know how these people have lived for years in exile on borrowed money, tea, sugar and bread.

From the moment you walk into a church filled with Iraqi refugees in Syria or Lebanon their faith, their devotion, their steadfast love of God is as real, as concrete, visible and tangible as the walls of the church.

Beirut / Damascus - In 2006 there was an explosion at the church where Zuhaila Mikha’s husband used to help out. Ramzi was killed. Then in July, 2007 Mikha’s 19-year-old daughter was kidnapped. After two months of asking police and hospitals for information about her daughter she got word from her neighbour: “Let your neighbour know she should not go to the police or we will kill her.”

She moved from Mosul to the nearby Christian village of Tel Eskoff. But after nine months trapped in the village — running out of money, afraid to go to the city, afraid to let her children out of her sight — it was time to get out of Iraq.

TORONTO - Well-known capital punishment opponent Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., will be giving the inaugural lecture honouring the prison ministry of the late Fr. Martin Royackers, who was murdered in Jamaica nine years ago.

Royackers was 41 when he was gunned down in front of his parish in Annotto Bay, Jamaica.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Students from Toronto’s Don Bosco High School are helping to commemorate the historical bond between Canadians and the Dutch people in a new monument celebrating the 65th anniversary of Holland’s liberation from the Nazis.

Don Bosco Catholic High School teacher Tim Stewart wrote the English and Dutch text accompanying a 1.2-metre tall, 900-kg black granite memorial that will be unveiled April 13 at Queen Wilhelmina Park in Meppel, Holland. The text speaks of the Toronto Scottish Regiment’s contribution to the liberation of Holland as the Second World War ground to an end.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Putting to rest rumours that Loretto Abbey is going to close, the Toronto Catholic District School Board says it plans to buy the Catholic high school property from the Loretto Sisters.

Angelo Sangiorgio, the board’s associate director of planning and facilities, told The Catholic Register that the board’s lease with the Loretto Sisters, also known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, expires in 2013.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The 12th annual Catholic Principals’ Council of Ontario conference will highlight the vocation of Catholic school principals across the province.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Embracing Our Catholic Vocation.” The conference runs from April 22 to 24 in Windsor, Ont.

Council president Paul Lacalamita said principals are “invested” in the faith formation of their community.

{mosimage}RABAT, Malta  - There have been many famous shipwrecks throughout history, but few can be credited with starting a nation on the path to Christianity. That’s exactly what happened in the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, however, an event the Maltese celebrate each Feb. 10.

Today, Malta is one of the world’s most thoroughly Roman Catholic nations, with 98 per cent of the population counted as adherents. Of those, 53 per cent say they regularly attend Mass.